Page 75 - Learn Bridge Ver2_Neat

Chapter 6. Defence.

When you are defending your problem is to know what your task is,
that is, just what are we trying to do?

The purpose of the defence.

It is to do one of two simple things -

! To defeat your opponents by taking enough tricks so that they
cannot make their contract;
! If that is not possible then you should be trying to take as many
tricks as possible for your side.

How do we do that?

The easy way would be to look at partner’s hand! However, no one
allows that so we must try another, legal route.
To get the best out of the cards when defending a contract, we should
try to paint a picture of our hand to partner while not helping the declarer
too much. This is, in itself, a very difficult task, but when you take into
account that partner must be watching at the same time it becomes nigh
on impossible.
However, we must be careful that we are both trying to paint the same
picture in the same style.
It is no good being like the pair shown here -

Paint the same picture

So, we start with the language of defence and the first phrase (or
phase) is always the opening lead. It is often most important to find a
good, well thought out lead, as this can cause a contract to be defeated, or,

61